ZURICH - Today skyguide, the Swiss air navigation service provider, and AirMap, the world’s leading airspace management platform for drones, successfully demonstrated Swiss U-space services nationwide in Switzerland. The demonstration was part of the Drone Innovators Network event put on by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with the Federal Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications (DETEC) and Presence Switzerland.
Skyguide is the first to deploy U-space services nationwide. U-space is Europe’s vision for the digital infrastructure to support safe and secure access to European skies for millions of drones. Like the U.S. “Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM)” initiative, U-space is a collaborative effort to enable situational awareness, data exchange, and digital communication for the European drone ecosystem. It is a powerful catalyst for the drone economy in Switzerland, home to a thriving community of drone companies.
In the demonstration, dozens of drones performed a wide variety of commercial tasks, including medical supply delivery and weather monitoring, across the entire country of Switzerland. Each drone connected to the skyguide system, which is powered by AirMap technology, to receive live information about airspace structure and traffic awareness, and to publish live positioning and flight path information to an air traffic management dashboard. The dashboard visualized fully integrated traffic stream for manned and unmanned aircraft.
“Last September, we successfully demonstrated U-space concepts with 3 flights in the city of Geneva,” said Alex Bristol, CEO of skyguide. “Today, we deployed nationwide U-space services showing live manned and unmanned traffic for dozens of drone use cases across Switzerland. This tremendous progress proves that U-space facilitates a safe and secure airspace system and that Switzerland is leading the way in drone innovation.”
“Today skyguide and AirMap showed that UTM services are ready to be deployed and can support live commercial drone services throughout Switzerland, and eventually across Europe,” said AirMap co-founder and chairman Ben Marcus. “It is an exciting prospect for Europe’s growing community of drone operators and sets a clear path that others can now follow.”
Earlier this year, skyguide and AirMap announced that they would join forces to develop Europe’s first national drone traffic management system: Swiss U-space. AirMap also announced today that it has opened an office in Zurich and will build a team there to work closely with skyguide to support Switzerland’s thriving drone ecosystem.
About skyguide
Skyguide provides air navigation services for Switzerland and certain adjacent airspaces of neighbouring countries. With its 1500 employees at 14 locations in Switzerland, the company guides some 1.2 million civil and military flights a year safely and efficiently through Europe’s busiest airspace. Skyguide has the ambition of building one of the most advanced Drone Traffic Management services as enabler for Switzerland’s drone ecosystems.
More about Swiss U-space at: www.skyguide.ch/u-space
Skyguide also operates a drone for maintenance purposes. By calibrating the ILS via drones instead of planes, skyguide will achieve significant reductions in costs (-360,000 CHF) and CO2 emissions (- 94 tons) by 2020. Several more applications are being developed.
About AirMap
AirMap is the world’s leading airspace management platform for drones. Millions of drones, hundreds of industry developers, and hundreds of airspace managers and stakeholders rely on AirMap’s airspace intelligence and services to fly safely and communicate with others in low-altitude airspace. AirMap connects the majority of the world’s drones to airspace authorities through integrations with major drone manufacturers such as DJI, Intel, senseFly, Matternet, 3DR, DroneDeploy, and more. Deployed in Japan, New Zealand, Switzerland, and the United States, AirMap leads the industry in delivering technology solutions for Unmanned aerial system (UAS) Traffic Management (UTM) and U-space to enable safe and responsible drone operations at scale.
Learn more about AirMap UTM at: www.airmap.com/utm
